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Indian restaurants in New York City make me feel like home. The interiors are decorated with art from the same sweatshops. Handmade wall ornaments painted in earthly hues, paintings of nature made in haste. Illustrations showing mythological figures, sports heroes and a distant relative. Some blinking lights, paper flowers and cityscape prints glued on walls, with peels revealing the sockets. Seeing the Brooklyn Bridge on the print makes more sense here then in Helsinki but it feels dislocated even so. The music is the same too. If I didn’t know better I would think these restaurants are designed by the same corporate stylist.

For the dominant, the popular classes are the perfect representation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a class-object; an object that can be manipulated by discourse, one day represented as the salt of the earth — the authentic poor — and the next day as racists and homophobes. In both cases, the underlying intention is the same: to prevent the popular classes’ speech, about themselves, from ever coming to the surface.

[…] the gilets jaunes movement is still a work in progress, and its language is not yet fixed in place: if there does exist homophobia or racism among the gilets jaunes, our responsibility is to transform this language.

[…] the gilets jaunes represent a sort of Rorschach test for a large part of the bourgeoisie. The gilets jaunes force them to express their class contempt and the violence that they usually only express in an indirect way.

On M.I.A. (2018) Momtaza Mehri. A celebration of the artist life and career (with some critical readings of M.I.A’s genre-flirting). Prompted me to listen to her again. I don’t agree with the sellout bits. It’s always a decision artists make and have to live with (you can be a sellout and a good artist too). Interesting text for learning about “Political blackness” in the UK context.

Authenticity is an unstable pedestal rooted in meticulously cultivated performance. It is externally adjudicated. No one understands this more than a slippery art school ingénue like M.I.A. Selling out means something entirely different when you come from no money. There are people who depend on you.

The class solidarities that once united communities facing street violence and economic disenfranchisement were bastardized by race professionals into the politics of lobbying and local government, a process abetted by New Left radicals in the name of political blackness. Tariq Modood tracked this phenomenon’s journey from factory floor to think tank, decrying a ‘false essentialism’ that assumes ‘all non-white groups have something in common other than how others treat them’.

Coalitions rooted in the denial of difference are bound to uncritically reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to dismantle, stifling criticism in the name of unity. Those excluded from hegemonic universalism should be the last to adopt reductive universals of their own. Too often, such gestural solidarities depend on the silencing and disciplining of dissenting black voices. ‘Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak’ Trinh Minh-ha writes in Woman, Native, Other.

Heard Andrew Lafkas in a Pennies from Heaven #9 event, organized by Control & Bánh Mì Verlag. This was one of the best gigs I’ve visited in the city. Lafkas played a contra-bass. He started the concert by droning individual strings for very long, which heightened our sensitivity to the resonances of the instrument. After the drone-phase be begun strumming the strings, while partially muting them. This caused string harmonic tones, which Lafkas focused on for the rest of the show. He produced a string harmonic melody, simultaneously with a bass line (caused by the striking of the strings) and the strings hitting the neck of the bass developed into a percussive beat. His performance was very physical and intensive.

Took some time and transferred all of the posts from hevoslinja.tumblr.com to this site. All of the +90 entries are designated to the Hevoslinja category (Finnish only). This was done due to changes in the tumblr service. Also transferred all no-chair-design.tumblr.com entries to this blog. Had to do some cleaning (removing broken links etc. There is still work to be done). All of the +50 entries are designated the NO-CHAIR-DESIGN category (English only). Also transferred the trans-mars.com blog entries from 2005 to this blog. Those entries are found in the TRANS-MARS category (Finnish).